Sunday, November 15, 2009

The "Personal" Server in My Everyday life...

[Dave Winer started a great conversation about "Personal Servers" over at his scripting.com site. My comments:]

(Personal Servers have) become part of my environment – part of my “operating system”. It’s an extension whose always-on real-time availability lets me host services, communications, aggregators, consolidators, syndicators, and so much more.

I have been living daily with “personal” servers since the mid 90’s. There is one running in the background on my laptop (and most of my other machines) as I write this comment (actually, it is running multiple server instances – port 80, 7070, 9090, and 443 [ssl]. This is ALWAYS present for me. The power of dynamic content generation and JIT compiling/execution is infinitely more useful when it exists real-time in your actual environment. I can modify a file, and simply by saving it the change is instantly available on the web. Likewise, via localhost, I can develop without the burden of FTP. Code, refresh, code, refresh. When I’m ready, and need more (such as the business/commercial aspect) then after I’ve locally fine-tuned, I upload to an offsite hosting rack.

But it’s not just for development. It has become part of my environment – part of my “operating system”. It’s an extension whose always-on real-time availability lets me host services, communications, aggregators, consolidators, syndicators, and so much more. I, for one, cannot imagine my environment without this power and flexibility.

+1 for Personal Servers

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